Court File and Parties
CITATION: Knight v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, 2020 ONSC 3896
COURT FILE NO.: 51/19 (Hamilton)
DATE: 20200623
SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE - DIVISIONAL COURT - ONTARIO
RE: Knight v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario
BEFORE: D.L. Corbett J.
COUNSEL: Ms Knight self-represented Applicant Mr Blumenthal for the HRTO
Case Management Endorsement
[1] This endorsement reflects a case management conference conducted by teleconference on June 22, 2020.
[2] This application from decisions of the HRTO requires ongoing case management to ready the case for hearing.
[3] During the course of the case management teleconference, the court learned that Ms Knight’s application concerns two proceedings at the HRTO. One was against her former employer, Surrey Place Centre, and the other was against the benefits provider in connection with her former employment, Manulife, and four persons associated with Manulife.
[4] As Ms Knight made clear, her concerns in this application are actions, decisions, or failures to act on the part of HRTO and its personnel, and not conduct of the respondents to her HRTO proceedings. She feels that her complaints were not handled properly by HRTO. Her application names the HRTO as a respondent, but does not name the respondents to her underlying HRTO complaints.
[5] The HRTO took the position with Ms Knight that she had to name all the proper respondents before the application would be constituted properly, and only at that point would the HRTO put a record together for use on the application. Ms Knight did not agree that this was appropriate and sought advice from staff at the Divisional Court office about what she should do.
[6] Divisional Court staff are trained to help people with procedural aspects of court proceedings, but they are not permitted to give legal advice. The line between being helpful about court procedures and giving legal advice is hard to draw, and is generally described by the court’s filing requirements: court staff will advise on what is required in order to file documents or to move a matter forward through the scheduling process, but will not otherwise advise people on how their proceeding should be brought.
[7] Matters were at a standstill – with Ms Knight wanting a record of proceedings prepared by the HRTO and the HRTO declining to do so until the proper parties were named in the application.
[8] At the case management conference, the court explained to Ms Knight that the respondents to the underlying HRTO complaints should be named as respondents to the application in Divisional Court, even though Ms Knight’s complaints in this court are about the HRTO. The reason this is required is because the underlying respondents are “interested” in Ms Knight’s application. They have an “interest” in whether this court sets aside the decisions below, substitutes a different decision for the decisions below, and/or orders that proceedings below be done over. Since they have an interest in what this court may do, they should be named in the application and be given a chance to be heard by this court.
[9] Ms Knight advised that she could amend her application to name the respondents below and send it to those respondents immediately. She proposed to do so by June 23rd, but the court imposed a deadline of June 26th, to give some additional time and to enable Ms Knight to serve a copy of this endorsement with her amended notice of application.
[10] Ms Knight’s application concerns two HRTO proceedings, as described above. The court raised an issue as to whether these matters ought to be in one application or two. For the time being the simplest thing to do is to continue with one application, and to consider the most efficient way to move forward once all affected parties are involved in case management.
[11] There was some discussion about how Ms Knight should serve materials. For now, the court directs that she serve by email as follows:
(a) Surrey Place: to the email address for Susan Munn, who may be succeeding counsel for this application. If it turns out that Ms Munn is not retained for this application, then, unless Surrey Place appears at the next case management conference, the court will give further directions about service on it.
(b) The Manulife respondents: to an email address for in-house counsel at Manulife (Ms Zaida, Ms Mackenzie or such other in-house counsel who may be identified by Manulife as having carriage of this application).
(c) HRTO: by email to Mr Blumenthal.
This endorsement does not validate service as described above, but rather gives Ms Knight direction on how to perform the service directed by the court. It is hoped and anticipated that the respondents to be added to the application will receive notice and will attend the next case management conference, so that there will be no issue with service.
[12] Once Ms Knight has served her amended notice of application and a copy of this endorsement, as described above, she shall so advise the court and provide the court with the email contact addresses for the persons she has served, and then court staff shall schedule a further case management conference to include Ms Knight, Mr Blumenthal, and the representatives for Surrey and the Manulife respondents. The court will give further directions for this case at that case management conference.
[13] The court has endorsed its fiat on this endorsement this day; the unsigned version distributed to the parties today has the authority and effect of the signed version, a copy of which will be provided to the parties in due course after the suspension of ordinary court operations is lifted.
D.L. Corbett J.
Date: June 23, 2020